I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  Dolph could see that I was unhappy, that I needed some reality, and to be cared for—not in the way that would turn me into this impossible, anomalous African queen, this battling elongated beauty encased in reflections of perfection, but as a person, in the real world, where I breathed, and cried, and bled. Dolph, being gentle and disciplined, a European and Australian karate champion, and also a Fulbright scholar, was exactly what I needed. I’d raced away from discipline after I left Jamaica, and Dolph brought it back. He understood the performance side; from the kickboxing, he appreciated the strain on mind and body of performing in a way that Jean-Paul didn’t. The way that, after you have performed and given so much, you can feel naked and exposed, horribly vulnerable and sensitive, and you need rebuilding. It’s as if you have been skinned alive. You open up a fantasy, and then you instantly revert to normalcy.

  You can see why singers like Janis Joplin couldn’t cope. One way is to take someone to bed with you after a show, but I could see with Janis how that can make a person feel lonelier, more estranged. I didn’t want to go that way, but the physical distance between Jean-Paul and me, and his inability to understand what it meant to actually perform for real, not on paper or film, was putting mental and emotional distance between us. It was pushing me closer and closer to believing that taking someone to bed with me every time I felt alone was a solution and not adding to the problem.

  Dolph could have been the beginning of that, of me taking the next available good-looking man to my bed. Luckily, Dolph didn’t take advantage of the situation, or quickly disappear after it was over. He wanted to get to know me, and he took me seriously as a person, not just a famous person.

  He knew how to deal with my extremes in a way Jean-Paul didn’t. Dolph could see I was getting high a little too much, I was getting too wild, and Jean-Paul didn’t know how to ground me, or didn’t want to. At the top you are alone, and it was an intense cycle of records, shows, promotion—and I am not in a band. Sometimes I think it might be better to be in a band and share the pressure. Mostly, I think, You’re born alone, you die alone—handle it, but sometimes, especially during that period of the international hits and the growing fame, and Jean-Paul being in a band with me in a way, but always elsewhere, I would have liked the company. To be with the only other three or four people who understand what you are going through because they are as well.

  Being with Dolph had nothing to do with him being big and beefy. He really took care of me when if he hadn’t done that, I would have died. I was so adrift because of how Jean-Paul refined the image of me but neglected the actual me. I would say that Dolph saved my life. I was touring so much. I felt super mature, but I was still very young in the sense that I was only really born when I moved to America—my childhood wiped out, devoured by my upbringing. So when I was twenty it was like I was eight; at thirty I was eighteen.

  I think Dolph understood that. He didn’t accuse me of being immature and childish. He looked at my situation and he thought, I am going to help you. Instead of you waking up and feeling self-destructive, taking something as a barrier to the stress, you should do something healthy. He said, “You will find a different, better sort of high, a sports high. You will get addicted to an oxygen high.” My regimen changed, during that one world tour, which would have destroyed me if I had carried on indulging.

  I was automatically drawn to Dolph because he was a gentle giant—very intimidating, being so big and fierce looking, but he was the opposite. He didn’t bully me, didn’t tease me when I was feeling fragile, and he turned me back on to sports. I had loved sports as a child; it was the one way I could play without getting into trouble. He renewed that enthusiasm I had, and he made me realize it could be a positive way of coming down after a performance, of dealing with the pressure of having to perform so regularly. He trained me to realize that exercise and discipline would save me.

  Another problem was that I was becoming a big pop star, and yet I still considered myself an underground act, almost an amateur in a way. I’d never really banked on having to deal with all the pressures of stardom when I set out—the decisions you have to make, and the way it both opens up your world but also shrinks it. You travel the world, but the walls close in.

  I knew that I was limited, but I understood how to make the most of those limitations. But I wasn’t really a singer or a dancer—a Jagger or a Tina—so I took things in unusual directions. In a way, I must always do that, because that is what works for me. If I got rid of that, it would be the end of me. I am not here to sing like Aretha and dance like James Brown. My goal was still in a way to do theater, and I was passing through. I knew that no one could match me in terms of theater; that’s where I was less limited.

  * * *

  Jean-Paul and I were nominated for a Grammy for the full-length video of A One Man Show. Jean-Paul missed his Concorde flight from Paris and couldn’t make it to L.A. for the ceremony. The Grammy publicists were trying to find me a date. They nominated a number of people to accompany me, and in the end settled on O. J. Simpson. Well, there was no way I was having that. I must have seen what was coming. So I asked my friend the actress Sarah Douglas, and we went together. I wore this massive Karl Lagerfeld hat shaped like victory, because I was fairly sure we would win. We didn’t.

  Following the event, I lost my invite to the after-party. I had presented an award, and I had been nominated, but I didn’t have the right pass to get into the party afterward. I got incredibly upset—we were in this huge line, and they would not let me in. When they turned me away, I tried to hold it in, but I was so upset. There was a lady in the queue, and she said, “Don’t mess with Grace!”

  I had had enough, especially because I didn’t even win the award. Duran Duran won, and they said to me, “Oh, Grace, you deserve the award, not us. You should have it.” I said, “Well, give it to me, then.” They kept it. They admitted that they had copied the staircase in their winning video from me and Jean-Paul in A One Man Show. To me, being beaten by Duran Duran reminded me of the Oscars a year or two before, when Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man were beaten by Ordinary People and Robert Redford.

  There was a really long hallway in this big building where the party was. I let out a huge scream that lasted as long as I could make it as we left the building. The police were called, and they were going to arrest me for disturbing the peace. Sarah tried to calm things down: “It’s okay, she’s okay, she’s feeling very upset, she didn’t win her award, we’re leaving now, it’s okay.”

  We had a limo pick us up. My hat was so big I couldn’t get it through the door. I ripped it off. I was in a really bad mood. The limo driver recognized Sarah from her appearance in Superman II, as one of the villains, and even though he had the glass partition up between us and him, he was eavesdropping on our conversation in the back of the car. He started to talk to her. I was livid and started screaming at him, “This is private!” And he said, “Well, this is my limo. Why don’t you get out?” He kicked us out of his car. I took my lipstick out and wrote all over the back of his car: ASSHOLE!

  We ended up catching a cab, with this awful leopard-print pattern on the seats. I sat with my Lagerfeld hat on my knee, miserable because it had all gone wrong. A One Man Show lost to Duran Duran, enough to make me scream and scream.

  Jean-Paul and I are still friends, more than thirty years later. We have our son, Paulo, a musician who often plays on stage with me, another of our masterpieces. We carried on collaborating. We still talk for ages on the phone. We exchange a lot of information about each other, which is true friendship. When we start talking we don’t stop . . . as long as I take time to listen. He always said, “You talk, but you don’t listen.” It’s because I get excited! He has to say, “It’s my turn now.” His ideas still thrill me and make me see things in a new way. He also still does things that annoy me. When he took a photograph of Kim Kardashian with a champagne glass perched on her ass in an impossible pose like the ones he di
d with me over thirty-five years ago, I asked him why he was giving her—as a basic commercial product—his ideas? This seemed to contradict his spirit of integrity, which he has protected for so long. Why was he repeating himself, just to give her a little flare of publicity, quickly absorbed by the next puff of self-promotion? Well, he replied, “I got the feeling that if I didn’t do the photograph, she would simply have the idea copied anyway. I might as well copy myself.” His ideas are so powerful that repeating them decades later still causes a hell of a fuss, however temporary. I also think he wanted to get a little respect from America for what he had done as an artist and in a way as a creative prophet. He might have done it to wind me up a little as well. Which he did.

  I think I know him better than anyone, certainly after his current wife, Karen. He knows me and I know him because we did spend a lot of time talking very freely. Even when we argued, we would end up laughing.

  Because we were working on A One Man Show before, during, and after our separation, it became pretty intense. Plenty of that positive and negative sexual, creative, and romantic energy went into the performing and making of it. It was entertainment, and the analysis of entertainment, and it was the story of a relationship. It’s what helps make it so fantastic. Ultimately, it is a love story, taken beyond belief.

  10.

  Octopus

  I was numbed by love and, at the time, I believed everything Jean-Paul said. Love weakens you. It makes you blind. It’s definitely an alien feeling, like you’ve been abducted. I turned down a role in Blade Runner because I was weak in the knees in love. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the script. I had so much respect for Jean-Paul, and I listened to him about what I should be doing and always asked for his advice.

  Jean-Paul wanted me only to work with him. Especially if I was going to do a film. He wanted me to do a film only with him, before anyone else. He always wanted to direct, and it was me who pushed him. We pushed each other, because we were artistic sparring partners. Jean-Paul didn’t believe in himself as a director at first, and I pushed him to try. He gained his confidence, and once he had it, he didn’t want me to work with another director.

  I knew he would be adamant that it was a bad move to appear in Blade Runner. I immediately said no, before I had even read the script and before I had even asked him. Jean-Paul was always in my head as I made decisions. When he heard about the film, he said what I thought he would say—it would be too commercial, and I would become too Hollywood. I would become a sellout.

  That was the worst thing to say to me. I was moving with artists who really were underground—known, even successful, but rooted in the avant-garde, experimental, and definitely not commercial—and you felt that you were all in it together and that to accept mainstream work was an unforgivable betrayal of some essential nourishing, progressive spirit. You felt part of a club, even if you didn’t get together every night, and there was an understanding of what that meant, and what you didn’t do in terms of accepting degraded commercial work.

  When I told Jean-Paul, even though I had already said no, he couldn’t resist going on about why it was such a bad thing to do. He told me that I would be exploited—my biggest fear. It was like joining another cult where you are told what to do, even as you pretend what you do is all about not being told what to do.

  One of those things you didn’t do at the time was a big budget Hollywood movie, even one based on an acid-tripping, time-bending 1960s science-fiction book by paranoid psychedelic activist Philip K. Dick. Turning down such jobs was definitely the spirit of that time, and it’s a spirit I have found difficult to shake off even as the world has gotten less discerning and discriminating.

  I still had the script, though, and the night after I had passed on the part, I was flying to Paris. I decided to read it on the plane. I absolutely loved it. It was set in a universe I visited a lot in my work and play. As soon as I landed I decided I would call them back and reverse my decision. I was too late. Overnight they had cast someone else.

  The director, Ridley Scott, must have really wanted me, because the part they offered me was bigger when he was thinking of me than how it appeared in the film. The character of Zohra, the Snake Lady they wanted me to play, had shrunk in the finished film. I think there would have been more of that character if I had accepted. Of course, everyone in that film, which was so much more cult and cool than commercial, went on to be really successful, their integrity enhanced by being in such a movie. The film’s reputation only increases with time.

  I should have made that decision myself, rather than being caught up in Jean-Paul’s rivalry with Ridley Scott in the world of commercials. At the time, they were both at about the same level, moving from art direction and TV ads into film. Ridley was slightly ahead, and I got tangled up in Jean-Paul’s jealousy. If I had seen the film Ridley had made a couple of years before, The Duellists, which was fabulous, I wouldn’t have thought for a moment about accepting. I said no without reading the script, which was very stupid of me.

  I found out years later when I hung out with Ridley’s brother, Tony, that Tony had fought so hard for me to be in one of his movies, The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis, but he just didn’t have the power. It was for a character called Cory. A small part, because she dies quickly, so she has to be memorable, so that people remember her. Her death sets everything up in the rest of the story. He wanted me; the producers wanted Halle Berry. They won. In a fight between the director and the producer, usually the producer wins.

  Ridley never asked me to work with him again. We saw each other a few times at functions and events, and I never bought it up. Tony said that Ridley fell in love with Joanna Cassidy, the actress they ended up choosing to play Snake Lady in Blade Runner. Later, they split up. He associated me with the heartbreak, so he never considered me again for any of his films. Tony said, “That’s why he hasn’t called you.”

  Later, I made the conscious decision after passing on Blade Runner that I would try the kind of movie I had turned down, the kind Jean-Paul had warned me against. I would get my feet wet. I don’t like regrets, but I did regret that I had not taken that role, and was struck by how quickly things had moved after I had said no. Within a day, someone else had been given the role. I had no chance to say, I’ve changed my mind. I reminded myself of my motto—try everything once. Because Jean-Paul’s influence was so great when we were together, I had not followed my own credo.

  I was intrigued by what it was like in that supposedly forbidden and corrupt Hollywood world. I felt I was made of stern enough stuff not to lose my head and be won over by false promises and fake charm. I wanted the experience, at least once, in the same way I had wanted to be a Playboy Bunny.

  The James Bond producers had really wanted me to be in a Bond movie, because in the 1980s, with the franchise threatened by changing times, they were chasing fashion and looking to reach a wider audience by involving more pop and rock. They had wanted me to be in Octopussy, in the title role, played by Maud Adams, but there was some anxiety about having a black woman as a villain. A Bond movie is, for all the appearance of sex and violence, a fundamentally very conservative franchise.

  They came back and offered me a part in the next one, A View to a Kill, the fourteenth Bond film. This time I was ready, and I followed my own instincts. I battled with memories of what Jean-Paul had said about Blade Runner: They are just going to exploit you. I wanted to prove to Jean-Paul that I could be in a movie without losing my integrity.

  It was what I always believed would happen when I went from modeling into music, that the musical door would open out onto the acting doors. Music was going to take me to theater and film. Acting was always where I felt I was going to end up. Here was my chance.

  That’s why I studied with Warren Robertson, on the recommendation of Jessica Lange. She’d gone to his classes, and people like James Earl Jones, Diane Keaton, Christopher Walken, and Viggo Mortensen studied under him. He made me realize that it was about having a
bsolute confidence in your own ability. He said, “I am going to teach you how you hold your own regardless of what everyone else is doing. How to find that one thing that can anchor you and your performance. Concentrate on yourself, and everything else will work around you with its own momentum.”

  He encouraged me to find an inner story. A memory that was all mine. May Day, my character in A View to a Kill, was very much of the attitude that if you messed with her, she was going to kill you. And to get to that point I did think of my step-grandfather. In the Bond film, playing the ruthless dominatrix in catsuits, mad hats, and flamboyant capes, taming a wild horse with a sneer, parachuting from the Eiffel Tower, I began to emulate Mas P, to copy his intense scowl. It’s there in the stare of May Day.

  I didn’t really think of it at the time, but I can see it now. I can be as scary as he was to me because I had him as a kind of role model, or at least as an adult showing me how a person got his own way. He taught me something about how to demand attention, but I could turn it into a cartoon, which takes the sting out of it for me. I can see it now in old pictures of him, this force in the eyes that I use in various ways as a performer. I realize now why that look has been second nature for me—I saw it all the time; it was part of how he controlled us. He tried to intimidate me, a vulnerable little girl, keeping me in check. That was my way of dealing with this monster—turn it into something he would have been horrified by. I threw it back into his face even if he never knew it.